Admittedly it’s a kind of reverse snobbery, but I can’t talk about wine, having no discrimination to speak of. 

The varietal I always go for is the one labelled ‘half–price’ and I don’t give a monkey’s whether you can taste the terroir in it or not. 

And I don’t think I’m the only one who’s made more entrenched in this position by listening to oenophiles talk, especially on the radio, with their ‘heaps of fruit’ and their disgusting, sloshy, squelchy mouth noises.

One of my favourite wine descriptions is a cartoon by the American humourist James Thurber, published in the New Yorker in 1937, where a sommelier is saying: ‘It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.’

Will we be amused, I wonder, by the presumption of the next generation of Houses of the Oireachtas wines? 

Is this kind of presumption amusing or is it more like a goad? After a certain point, are you not out of presumption and into pure notions?

The tender for the own–label wine went out this week, valued at €400,000 not including VAT – up from €300,000 the last time – for two reds and two whites. 

It’s reported they will be chosen by officials at a blind tasting later in the summer. So until then we won’t know which approachable little wine with lashings of blackcurrant and top notes of Jack Russell breath they’ve picked.

We do know, though, that the last time the tender was opened, in 2022, they wanted something ‘young, clean and fresh’ in a Sauvignon Blanc, and a ‘young, fruity, dry’ Merlot. 

By a process of elimination then, they’ll be wanting something young, clean and very, very dry. Step forward there, Jack Chambers. You fit the description.

By all accounts, the House of the Oireachtas wine has been a huge success since its launch 13 years ago. 

It sells for €6.60 a glass at present, or €16 a bottle, but staff get a discount rate of €12 a bottle. 

And earlier this year it was reported that the own–label wine accounted for 17% of all drinks revenue in 2025, with 4,851 glasses and 1,063 bottles sold, as well as two cases costing €180 apiece. 

This is presented as a good–news story about revenue.

Allow me to take you back a bit though. It was in October 2013, with the Troika still hovering over us all like dementors, that someone dreamt up the idea of an own–label Leinster House wine. 

I repeat: At the very same time that our international financial masters were making final arrangements for the repayment of a €67.5billion bailout debt, and while families all over the country were losing their depreciated homes, the Oireachtas was devoting at least some of its time to choosing a cheeky little vintage to amuse the members.

I point this out by way of pressing home the reminder about priorities, because now, every four years when the new tender is announced for the Houses of the Oireachtas own–label wine, the reaction is always strangely muted. 

‘Nothing to see here,’ says everyone. ‘Bars and restaurants order in wine and sell it on at a profit. No big deal.’

Well, yes, but not so fast if you don’t mind. As well as the matter of priorities, there’s the matter of optics. 

We have half a million families in arrears on their energy bills, more than 17,000 people in emergency accommodation, chronic hospital overcrowding, a significant poverty gap and a huge and growing number of ‘working poor’. 

But still we have to chip in to make sure our TDs and senators have their own plonk to make themselves look important. That’s just how up themselves they’re after getting. Plonkers.

And chip in we do. While we’re always told by spokespeople for the Oireachtas that the food and drink in the bars and restaurants are not directly subsidised, the fact is the catering services are very much subbed by you and me. 

That’s why food and drink are cheaper there than anywhere else in the capital. The taxpayer covers all the overheads, including paying the staff – and that quite handsomely too. 

An ad last year for a Leinster House bar ‘chargehand’ (no, me neither) advertised a salary of around a grand a week. That’s a fair bit more than a nurse gets.

According to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission annual report for 2024, the catering services reported a small net surplus of €49,713 that year. But obviously that doesn’t include payroll costs, which came in at just under €2.5million.

And all so that our TDs and senators can continue to enjoy their deep–fried calamari accompanied by a crisp Sauvignon Blanc for far less than what it would cost the rest of us to dine out so well, if we could afford to dine out at all.

But the big question is, why are they drinking in any case, in a place of work? Where else are people who are being paid six–figure salaries allowed to pop over to the bar mid–shift for a dram or two of Midleton Very Rare?

Bar sales were up a third last year, to €445,000, reports in February of this year revealed, as our legislators sank 13,000 pints of Guinness in 12 months, plus shots of tequila and sambuca and, in many cases, stuck it on their tab. What are they, students?

We also found out that 120 packets of mints were sold, presumably among those who wanted to conceal their beery breath in the Dáil and Seanad chambers. 

They’re then debating and voting with ‘drink taken’, and they’re getting away with it for some reason no one can explain.

It’s against this background of unprincipled and reckless behaviour that the next Oireachtas house wine will be selected. 

I’ll chance a description of the vintage: Hints of broken promises in the nose, full–bodied incompetence in the mouth–feel, and bitter betrayal in the finish.

It pays to be a Barbie girl in a Barbie world 

From the Surely You’re Exaggerating department: Miley Cyrus has said it’s a ‘dream come true’ to see her own likeness in a new Barbie doll.

The doll is dressed in fake leather, as Miley was in her Golden Burning Sun music video, and she says she and manufacturer Mattel ‘spent so much time really digging into the details’.

She said it ‘wasn’t just important to me in designing the Barbie, but it’s also very important to my own creativity and the way I represent myself’. What now? What’s that you say? She added: ’Holding my Barbie in my hands is a true full–circle moment.’ Who knew Miley was so easily pleased?

Anyway, the Wrecking Ball singer joins a long list of stars immortalised (at least for as long as the market lasts) as Barbie, including Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry, David Bowie… never mind, it would be easier to name the celebrities who haven’t been Barbied.

Miley Barbie has a microphone accessory (warning: choking hazard) and articulated joints for play and display fun! She retails at €84.99, out of which Miley must be getting a nice consideration to compensate her for this ridiculous puffery.